Café in its best form.
With Cuba we will take a coffee at Knopfdruck for a few moments.
Because with the new Cuba-Wan capsule machine from Cuba, it is known as the "Cathé from special meetings". Full Monday, Arômen, Thank Innovative Press Blue Technologie and over 17-Sorten Café for every match.
Lébe Premium Café is already in the 19th century. And here is the Cuba capsule machine in Diner Chibofiale and of Chibode E. Before we get started, just to let you know.
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and will gain all the other benefits of a paid free press subscription. That's access to our journalism, podcasts, community features, and event perks. Subscribe today and save yourself waiting for the next episode. Remember when I said the Charles Windberg did a lot of bone-headed things during the search for his kidnapped son?
Well, let me give you a pre-mo example. He instructed the bank that was putting together the ransom money. The money that John Condon was going to give to Cemetery John to make sure they kept no record of the serial numbers of the bills. That way, the money couldn't be traced.
I kid you not. Why in the world would the great aviator suggest such a thing?
“Well, he felt that the easier he made it for the kidnappers to get away,”
the better the chances they would give him his child back.
Of course, for those who now take a darker view of Windberg's actions, he's just another data point suggesting his involvement in the crime. He wanted to make it easy for the kidnappers because, you know, he was in on it. As usual, Nolan Schwarzkoff was willing to go along. But that treasury official, Elma Aire, the guy who put Al Capone in jail
and refused to let him out for Lindberg's sake. He put his foot down. His title was Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the US Treasury. And he told Lindberg that if the money went to the kidnappers unmarked, the treasury department would abandon the case.
Reluctantly, Lindberg went along with Aire's demand. And though he didn't tell us to Lindberg, Aire had a little trick up his sleeve. When they put the ransom together, they had Elma Aire and he knew it wasn't well-known, but he knew that President Roosevelt was going to order all gold certificates to be turned in. It was going to be legal to hoard gold.
So, they made sure a substantial part of the ransom was paid in gold certificates, because in 1933, when this was going to happen and Aire knew it was going to happen, they would become much easier to spot. Gold certificates were bills that were back, not just by the US government, like the dollars, but by actual gold reserves.
You know, the bricks and fort knocks. They had a distinctive look. At Aire's instructions, the treasury team recorded a master list of every serial number of the gold certificate bills intended for the ransom. Since smaller denominations to the bills, such as 5's and 10's and 20's,
we're going to be used in the ransom, the list was long, like 5,100 serial numbers. That was the money that Jafsey handed over to Cemetery John. We all know that they sent out lists of the serial numbers on the bills to all the bank tellers and so forth, but checking every bill like this, the odds of them catching it isn't very good.
But when it's discolored certificates and they're unusual to see, it's, you know, and they're on the orders you will check every gold certificate. Over the course of the next few years, small amounts of the ransom money did show up in banks, mostly in the Bronx. But by the time the banks figured out a particular bill was part of the ransom,
“too much time and pass for the teller to remember who turned it in.”
But then, on September 15, 1934, more than two years after Little Lindy was taken, a brown Dodge Sedan pulled into a gas station. The driver was well dressed, and he spoke in a foreign accent. The manager of the station filled the tank.
And when it came time to pay, the customer handed over a $10 gold certificate. Now the attendant didn't suspect the man of being the Lindberg Kidnapper. He was just worried that he was going to get stiff, because the bank wouldn't accept the bill which were no longer legal tender. So, he wrote the license plate on the back of the bill just in case.
This time, when the certificate was deposited, the bank quickly realized it was part of the ransom. The teller recalled that it had been deposited by a filling station.
The police tracked down the right station,
spoke to the manager, traced the license plate,
“and discovered the car belonged to, you guessed it, Bruno Richard Houtman,”
a German carpenter. They arrested Houtman, even though they had other leads for other people at the time, they just dropped all the other leads, and didn't want to pursue anything. That money kept appearing in New York, and they said,
"Oh, forget about it. We're not going to track the money anymore." So, that was it. They had their man, or did they? I'm Jonah Serra, and for the free press, this is the Lindberg Conspiracies. This is episode three, follow the money. Once Houtman was arrested,
the investigators stopped looking into other possible suspects. Bruno Richard Houtman was the guiltyest man I ever knew, Elma Aire wrote after he retired. Once they had Houtman, the investigators had one clear cut goal.
Together, enough evidence to put him in the electric chair.
Some of that evidence was real and undeniable, but some of it was, well, pretty shaky, and that's a polite way of putting it. In Germany, where Houtman grew up,
“he was a small-time crook who had spent some time in prison”
for burglary and theft. Historian Anthony Skuduto, who wrote a book about the case, honored the anecdotes that show Houtman was clearly a rather cheeky criminal.
While exercising in the jail yard one day, Houtman slipped through an open gate, but not without leaving his prison clothes on a doorstep with a noted red, best wishes to the police.
He was 24 when he came to America as a store-way in July, 1923.
It was his second attempt.
The first time he'd been caught and sent back. A decade after coming to America, Houtman was living in the Bronx and working as an itinerant carpenter. His wife Anna,
who, by the way, fiercely defended him until her death in 1994 at the age of 95, she worked part-time in a bakery. They had just had a son named Manfred. Like most Germans in the US,
Houtman faced prejudice, a holdover from World War I.
“Renell Delmont has a rather pithyway of putting it.”
"German, illegal alien, anybody heard about illegal aliens lately?" Houtman spoke broken English, and that was one bit of evidence against him. The gas station attendant,
Jassie Lindberg, they all said the man they heard had a strong German accent. Remember, "Hey Doc?" But his inability to speak English fluently, heard him in ways that went well
beyond the evidence, especially during the trial. Here's Richard Kahel. When he was being cross-examined, he was asked about his past and his criminal past.
And one of the fences that he had been charged and convicted of in Germany was a robbery, an old robbery, where there were women who had baby carriages and he had another person held them up at gunpoint.
And they were trying to say, "Oh, how could you do that with a baby in the child and so forth?" And he screamed out, "Everybody had baby carriages." Lindberg knew what he meant.
What he meant was that, at that time period in Germany, it was horrible inflation, and it was a very difficult time. And what a lot of people did is they would hide their
value, it was in a baby carriage, because what monster would go through a baby carriage, but he couldn't express it. But then there was this. When investigators searched his property for clues,
they found 14,000 dollars in gold certificates. Certificates, they were unquestionably part of the ransom. How men did have an explanation for this. Retired cop Greg Algrin. He had a story about another immigrant
having given him the money to keep before going back to Germany and dying of natural water to break the losses that lead. That story could be correct. As a matter of fact,
there was such a fellow, another German immigrant named Isadora Fisch. And he did go back to Germany in December 1933, nine months before Hoppen was arrested. And he did die of tuberculosis.
After Hoppen was arrested, investigators retrieved the bills, fish had used to pay for his return trip. And you know what? They were goal certificates with serial numbers
that showed they'd been part of the ransom. But with fish dead,
Prosecutors had zero interest in pursuing an angle
that might exonerate Hoppen. They take Hoppen into the police station in New York, on the Greenwich police station.
And basically beat the hell out of the guy,
using a hammer, wrapped in a sock, and everything else. And sleep depriving him, having him up constantly, forcing him to copy the ransom notes as they were, and so on.
He won't fess up. Evidence that might suggest Hoppen didn't do it, or at least didn't do it alone, is completely ignored. Now I gotta tell you,
from living in the Sarah Lens across the driveway.
“You might remember from previous episodes,”
Jim Davidson telling us he lived in the area. In fact, he lived very close to the Lindbergh house in Hopwell. They only paved that road in 1969. Right now, you can barely get two cars across it. Back then, it was literally a trail,
and no signs up on the mountain, and to have somebody from the Bronx come out and find this house.
There's almost no possibility,
but yet, once Haltman found the money, that's how everything changed. And they didn't want to hear anything that distracted from the possibility that Bruno was there guy.
And it was also interesting the state police intimidated anybody that would back Haltman's excuse, like the day the ransom money was paid. It was his birthday,
and they were having a party as house. And that didn't mean anything to the police, and if somebody like Hans Coupleberg. Hans and Bruno were best friends.
“Came forward and said, "I was at this party."”
They said, "Well, then you're going to be an accessory to the crime." So, you know, one by one, any of Haltman's alibis were just intimidated out of the picture.
To be fair, investigators kept finding evidence pointing to Haltman's guilt, too. Remember, he was a carpenter. Two marks on the ladder match tools he owned, and he seemed to have a set of chisels
that match the chisel found at the scene of the crime. Then there was the ladder, the infamous ladder. Some of the wood used to make the ladder was found to match wood used as flooring in his attic.
At his trial, a wood expert would say as much. And then there's something really odd. Condence telephone number and address were found squirreled on a doorframe inside Haltman's closet.
Author Maria Fredericks, thanks all of these unanswered questions of what keep modern day investigators can't lie and frustrate it. I think the fact that the crime scene
was not properly secured. That footprint evidence was eradicated. The fact that when you're dealing
“with a family of the wealth and influence”
of the limburgs, and the person who is executed happens to be a poor undocumented immigrant, I do think that the evidence with Haltman, the ladder evidence,
the fact that when he was asked about having condons number written in his closet, I think the unanswered questions of how did Haltman go from the Bronx to Hopewell, New Jersey?
What did he intend to do with the trial? In fact, with every piece of evidence against Haltman,
there always seems to be something else
that sheds doubt on it. Like that phone number in the closet, a journalist later said he wrote it, but then why did Haltman agree that he'd been the one to write it?
Haltman's answer was, "Oh, I was a little bit interested in the trial, so I guess I jotted it down." Well, if I hadn't put Jeff's number in my closet,
I would not say that I had. Great organ. The former cop who thinks the kidnapping was a lindberg prank on wrong says there's plenty to point the Bruno
being an extortionist, but not a kidnapper. In other words, the reason he saw Condon's note in the Bronx home news
was because he lived in the Bronx and he saw an opportunity. He couldn't very well have been extortionist, and I think one of the mistakes
that people who came before us may is that they feel well, if Haltman didn't do it, that he must be innocent, must be this guy who was framed,
that he must be this poor individual. But it's not a blank or white. How much things he was an extortionist? I mean, the fish story can be correct, but they really wanted to put him in Hopewell.
I don't think the evidence puts him in Hopewell. So if you say,
Look, he's an extortionist,
if he'd gotten up and not stand and said, I tried to make money off this. I did all these things. And you take all of that away,
and if you can see it's there, whatever it is there that he's in Hopewell.
So you think he basically
was an opportunist, maybe he knew who people who were involved he acted upon that and then paid. That's a positive deal. The death penalty for that decision,
but just was not actually involved in the kidnapping itself. I mean, then go to the press and it says, we will pay a ransom, no questions asked,
they'll be no prosecution, just give us the baby. He says that in the middle of the American depression. I mean, guess what happens? I mean, every crime artist in the world
is coming forward in Dow Eugene Hopewell, or Jersey, with ransom demands and tips and everything else. We know the money was given that over.
The last is, there was no stranger of ducks. Or it's unlikely. There was a stranger of ducks. Because he's an ex-cop,
all grunt tends to be open to a variety of possibilities when a case hasn't been solved. It doesn't matter to him, whether it's the winburg kidnapping or a local homicide.
Renell Delmont, though, is convinced that Hopewell was railroaded and that Lindberg is largely responsible. When we were at the cemetery, Greg and Renell got pretty animated about this.
But that's the story, it may not be true. She's talking about Condon and Lindberg. Remember, Renell, thanks to Lindberg, was in on it, and Condon, over time, became a co-conspirator. Great, but we don't all we know are good people.
I'd say this other time in my case. Somebody would say, "Well, this happened." And I'll say, "No, we don't know the best we have."
“All we know is that that's what Witte is said here.”
Right, the liar. Witte is beat. The other liar. Right. To people all we ever know in case
is what people say about it. Right. He don't know what happened. That's my point. Poppy and I spoke to a psychologist named Jerry Cross.
He believes Hotman was innocent, and he puts a lot of weight on the fact that he was German. To him, there was significant prejudice towards Germans after World War I. And maybe, just maybe residing in the American psyche with something more, a premonition even. Often goes to a gas station and says, "I got a nice $20 bill." And that's how he gets arrested.
He didn't know if this was the Lindberg money, but he's spending the Lindberg money, and that's how he got caught. And he was totally innocent, but he was a German. That was extremely important that he'd be put to death. Because something was girdling in the American unconscious,
they knew something was going to happen. But it hadn't happened yet. Hitler is appearing. Nazism is starting to show its face. And then the Lindberg child is kidnapped.
“I think it's a premonition rather than a reflection of the past.”
Why are you so convinced that Hotman was innocent? Oh, simple. I could do a forensic approach, but I'll do a psychological approach. If you're guilty, I mean, he had a wife and he had a newborn baby, and he was offered, I don't know, 75 or $95,000.
He was going to go to the electric chair. And a journal said, it will give you $95,000. You tell us the story, that money will go to your wife and their children. They'll be taken care of the rest of your life. And if he was guilty, that wouldn't have been a bad idea,
but he said, no, I will never do that.
He turned down the money. An innocent man would do that, but a guilty man would not do that. The ransom notes, of course, were important pieces of evidence. So the question became, had Hotman written them. How can you not be a woman?
But we are a woman's wife, but we are a woman's husband. A child or a child, with the children of the child of the child, will be given the best choice. Or if and if. Now, online, and 15-year-old Amazone,
WVV.di.de. As a child and a child, you want to go for all of them. Come quickly quickly. In the case of a product market, then in the next step, or in the first big enterprise.
With Ka-e, the development of Amazon's development, also the previous security. And that is, as a result of this, where the security and compliance really goes, it is really worth it.
That's why it is important.
“That's why many startups are happy and happy.”
And when it comes to the audience, you can't even imagine that you are a woman.
Now, let's start with the first step.
The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step.
The first step is to start with the first step.
The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step. The first step is to start with the first step.
Here's the cool thing. You can actually go down to the New Jersey State Police Museum, where there's a big Lindburg exhibit that includes a handful of the ransom notes. Needless to say,
Poppy and I did exactly that on a crisp October day last year.
“We have on here replications of the various key ransom notes.”
And what is immediately obvious seeing them like this is different writers. In all, the Lindburgs received 15 ransom notes and 13 envelopes.
The most important one, of course, is the first one.
The one that was left by the window on the night of. Poppy came to a pretty quick conclusion when she compared the original ransom note to the others in the Lindburg exhibit. You don't have to be a handster at writing expert,
but they are written by different people. From the night of to here, it doesn't all match. Although the handwriting experts said all the notes were written by Hoffman, the naked eye says otherwise, or at least Poppy's naked eye.
And I got to tell you at mine too, here we come to a pretty interesting modern day twist in the plot. It would be really simple to determine Hoffman's guilt or innocence right now. Simple.
How? With DNA, of course.
The kidnapper had to lick the envelope to seal it
and he also had to lick the back of the stamp. All these years later, the DNA of the kidnapper would still be on the envelope in the stamp. But whenever the New Jersey State Police Museum has been asked to do DNA testing of the ransom note,
it is always said no. When we asked their rationale, they wouldn't even discuss the matter. They acted like we wanted them to devolve the nuclear code. A thing with DNA testing, typing, anything to do, any forensic examination.
We can't discuss at this time. Kurt Perlack is a lawyer and Lindbergologist who has filed multiple lawsuits against the museum to get the envelopes tested.
“I think that the only way to get real justice here”
is to find out out of these 225,000 pieces of paper, the 15 or so that might have tangible DNA should be examined, should be tested. And if Houtman's DNA is on those 15 pieces of paper, great.
I think it's more likely than not that at least one of those pieces of paper does not have Houtman's DNA on them. Kurt says that officials at the museum have tried to put them off from pursuing this by telling them the Lindberg kidnapping is a nothing burger.
Kurt, this is a 90-year-old case that nobody cares about anymore. So my answer back to that was, well, that's great. If nobody cares about this, then why do you guys care about it? Why can't you allow some DNA testing on a couple pieces of paper? Yeah, no, we're not going to do that.
And they weren't really giving a reason as to why. It was just the answer's no. So like, they wanted me to clearly go away. But God bless him, he hasn't. We'll catch up with him again later.
“Meanwhile, let's head back to the 1930s.”
Here's the case the police were building against Bruno. A German immigrant drove from the Bronx to Hopewell, somehow made his way to Lindberg's house in the woods. He then looked out because it turned out to be the rare weekday the Lindberg's were there.
He climbed into the warped, unlocked window, using a ladder he had built himself. He grabbed the baby and climbed out without leaving a fingerprint or a mud stain from his boots. How did the baby die?
The investigators theory was that the ladder cracked. Puzzling Hopman to drop the baby. Little Lindy died when his head hit the ground. In a panic, he disposed of the body in the woods. Then he began sending the Lindberg ransom notes
and took the money from Condon in the cemetery. For a long time, he didn't spend the money because he assumed the banks had the serial numbers. But eventually, he couldn't wait anymore. And he used one too many goals certificates.
And he got caught.
The state of New Jersey always viewed it as an open and sharp case.
He climbed in, he grabbed the baby, he climbed out, he dropped the baby, and a story. But if that's not what really happened. If Hopman was just an extortionist trying to make a fast buck, why not just confess that and save himself?
Rosing Hopman gets down the jury box, up in the jury, wooden box, in 1935. And he says, "I'm a real jerk. I saw an opportunity to make money and saw Jeff's announcement of the Bronx news. I figured I could make some easy money.
So I figured I'd scam a national hero. I'm sorry, I did that. I'm ashamed of myself.
Yes, I did that.
I took the money. I went to the cemetery. I pocketed the money.
I used it to buy things over the years.
But I wasn't on that lad of in Hopo. Does the jury conduct? Yes. There was no way he was going to learn.
“The whole country wanted to see the guy died.”
I don't think if you admit to one,
they're like, what else does this guy lying about? Doesn't matter that he was truthful about this one thing. It must be a ploy to cover up his larger crime, which was the kidnapping. One thing's for sure.
“It the kidnapping itself was the crime of the century.”
The trial that took place in January
at February 9, 35 was the trial of the century. The question nobody was asking in the 1930s is the question today. Did Richard Bruno Hopman get a fair trial? That's next time.
Very good, very good. Very good? This trial is very good. It says a lot. Cool, he says that.
Stift on the wall and test computer,
“focus money, chip finance, search for something.”
Mega. But that's what it's supposed to be. No. A few photos of the country's history make it very clear.
It's very good. It's very good. Hold your money. With this trial.
